Monday, June 19, 2017

Ralph D. Winter (1924-2008) Missiology and Founder of the US Center for World Missions

Ralph Winter stepped onto the world stage at the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland. There he issued a call for other Protestant evangelists to proselytize to the world's "unreached people," those who had not been exposed to Christianity. In identifying mission fields, Winter looked for "ethnic pockets," isolated areas where language, ethnicity, culture and social status as well as religion had hindered the spread of the Christian Gospel.

Winter was born in South Pasadena in December 1924, the middle son of Hugo H. Winter and his wife Hazel. Hugo was a prominent freeway designer with the Los Angeles Bureau of Engineering, and his wife, Hazel.

Ralph Winter earned a bachelor's degree in civil engineering at Caltech before serving in the Navy during World War II. After his discharge, he studied for a doctorate in linguistics, anthropology and mathematical statistics at Cornell. He then attended Columbia, where he received a master's degree in teaching English as a second language, and Princeton Theological Seminary, where he was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1956.

In 1956, he and his wife Roberta went as missionaries to Guatemala. Roberta was a registered nurse. Ten years later he returned to the United States to become professor of missions at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. At Fuller he trained missionaries, sharing with students his experiences working with the indigenous Maya people of Latin America. Roberta died in 2001.

In 1976 he decided to leave the classroom to become a strategist for Christian outreach, founding the interdenominational U.S. Center for World Mission on the former campus of Pasadena Nazarene College. A year after establishing a research institute there, he founded the related William Carey International University.

In 2005 Ralph Winter was included along with Rick Warren and James Dobson in Time's compilation of the most influential American evangelicals.

Dr. Winter died at age 84 at his home in Pasadena after battling multiple myeloma and lymphoma. Winter is survived by his second wife, Barbara and his 4 daughters: Elizabeth Gill, Rebecca Lewis, Linda Dorr and Patricia Johnson, all of whom became involved in missions.

Having worked with Dr. Ralph Winter on a few projects, I can say that he was a dynamo and a visionary. May his memory be eternal!

Saturday, June 3, 2017

Now that President Donald Trump has backed out of the Paris Climate Change agreement, employment prospects for bioethicists may pick up. Let me explain

The boundaries of bioethics are very elastic, and on some maps they take in care for the natural environment. I would predict that in the measure that scientists lose faith in a political solution to global warming, some will back geoengineering projects to cool the planet.

These include tactics such as injecting aerosols into the upper atmosphere, dumping iron filings into the sea to promote algal blooms, and machines to capture carbon dioxide. These involve significant risk and place great power in the calculations of technocrats. They need to be studied very carefully. As University of Chicago climate scientist Raymond Pierrehumbert said a few years ago, “I see lots [of geoengineering ideas] that are feasible but they all terrify me.”

A 2010 conference on the ethics of climate intervention at Asilomar, in California, addressed some of these issues using principles drawn from the famous Belmont principles of autonomy, beneficence, non-malificence and justice. And who knows more about these than bioethicists? Dust off those resumés.